A woman awakes to an eerie cacophony of car alarms apparently triggered by a loud boom. Is it gunfire, or a break-in? Where are we? And who is the woman who inhabits this supremely dislocated world? The simple answer is that she is Jessica, a market gardener who grows orchids in the Colombian city of Medellín but is currently in Bogotá to be at her sister’s hospital bedside, from which she views the mountainous countryside through a crack in the curtains. But nothing is as it seems in this slow-drawing film from Thai artist and film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which spools out like one of the auditory hallucinations from which Tilda Swinton’s scrupulously introverted Jessica suffers.
By slowing the camera down to a glacial speed, Weerasethakul compels viewers to become listeners: the scrape of a chair across a floor, a backfiring bus, a loud thud as a stray dog wanders across a square, and the recurrent thrum of heavy rainfall: all appear to tell ominous stories that are dreamlike and rooted in reality. In her search for a physical representation of the sound only she can hear, Jessica visits a recording studio where, with the help of an earnest young sound engineer, Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), who turns out not to exist, she settles on one described as “body hits duvet hits wood bat”. Typically of this film, body, duvet and wood bat are all commonplace objects but the grammar of their combination makes a surreal sort of poetry. You can feel it without having any idea what it means.
The understory is of historic trauma buried deep in the lushly forested Amazon landscape. Ancient skeletons with holes drilled in their skulls are being mechanically excavated from tunnels in the mountains. The most articulate character turns out to be a peasant with total recall, also called Hernán, who scales fish for a living, and listens in to the stories of stones. He gently berates Jessica for crying over memories that are not her own, but this isn’t a glib story of cultural appropriation. For this older Hernán (Elkin Díaz), sleep is a little death: lying down on the riverbank, with eyes open as if dead, he demonstrates how he screens out the cries of the past, even as he tunes into them.
But it’s the landscape itself that has the last word in an audacious finale, in which the hills heave into science-fictional life. Everyone who has stayed the distance will find their own meaning in this. To me it suggests that, with hands joined across a kitchen table, Jessica and Hernán become a portal to a quantum reality that belongs simultaneously to nobody and to everyone who ever has, and ever will have, lived.
